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Spoiler Alert: Can’t find too much fault with this movie

Todd Hill
Published 9:13 a.m. ET June 12, 2014

Ansel Elgort, left, and Shailene Woodley star in a “The Fault In Our Stars.”
AP This image released by 20th Century Fox shows Ansel Elgort, left, and Shailene Woodley appear in a scene from "The Fault In Our Stars." (AP Photo/20th Century Fox, James Bridges)(Photo: James Bridges, AP)

“What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?” – Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal) in the 1970 film “Love Story.”

I

don’t cry at movies, or at least not when the movies want me to.

Even though I was surrounded by sobbing 13-year-old girls during a screening of “The Fault in Our Stars,” the movie of the summer (so far), concerned with two teenage terminal cancer patients falling in love, I sat there dry-eyed.

But I’m not bragging, because there was in fact one moment that got to me, when Hazel and Gus kiss for the first time in Amsterdam’s Anne Frank Museum. You see, “The Fault in Our Stars” isn’t a movie about dying, but living, regardless of a life’s statute of limitations.

It’s also a uniformly good movie, the kind of entertainment we all should try and get behind, not just the adolescent girls who ate up the John Green young-adult novel that inspired this picture.

Of course, it’s easy to understand why someone would want to stay away from a film like “The Fault in Our Stars.” To them, preaching that death is something we all must deal with, usually several times in a lifetime before we must confront our own mortality, is so much wasted breath. Most of us don’t care to imagine a world without us in it. I get that.

People want escapism at the cinema, not reminders of reality at its grimmest. But “The Fault in Our Stars” isn’t grim. It isn’t perfect either. Its lead characters, for instance, despite being 17, 18 years old, have everything figured out. They’re wise beyond anyone’s years to an extent that doesn’t ring entirely true.

But that’s a minor quibble, as is my complaint about the slo-mo shot of agonized parents rushing upstairs to save a daughter suffocating from fluid in her lungs, especially when held up against the flaws of so many of the other weepies that have gone down in cinematic history.

I have for years attempted to defend “Terms of Endearment,” reminding detractors that the 1983 film is an exquisitely written, fabulously acted family drama anchored in real emotion, at least until the waterworks are shamelessly unleashed at the end.

But there my backing of intensely sad motion pictures comes to a screeching halt. “Love Story” is a ridiculous movie, wretched on too many levels to detail here, that deserves to be forgotten. Ali McGraw develops a cough (presumably from riding around in a convertible MG during the dead of winter), and five minutes later her character is dead, and we’re supposed to suddenly generate empathy out of thin air?

Movies about dying, defenseless, domesticated animals are typically even more offensive. I wanted to commit disturbing violence upon 2008’s “Marley & Me,” in which Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson have the same hair color as their adorable, beloved, albeit doomed, golden retriever.

I would like to see a remake, however, set in an urban environment and featuring a pit bull. No?

That someone this cynical about manipulative storytelling has embraced “The Fault in Our Stars” should say something, and something that goes beyond just this writer’s admiration for the remarkably emotional presence of actress Shailene Woodley, who I first noticed in 2011’s “The Descendants,” even as she wears a nasal cannula.

“The Fault in Our Stars” isn’t a sad movie because somebody dies (given the storyline, that’s not exactly a spoiler). It’s sad because Hazel thinks of herself as a “grenade,” and because Gus fully expects to be noticed by the universe, and because we live in a world where funerals are for the living, not the dead, and so on. That John Green isn’t a bad writer.

Audiences, at least those brave enough to see it, are free to take any number of things from “The Fault in Our Stars.” No, life isn’t fair, and the world isn’t a wish-granting factory. Maybe that’s not exactly revelatory, but if Hazel and Gus can reach such a conclusion — and what’s more, make peace with this reality — then maybe we can try.